Chapter III: Part I: Holborn (3)

Again the code of her upbringing banished her momentary hesitation.

"Unless," I said, "you have already----"

"Oh no!" she said, with quick frankness. "I only meant that I nearly always go alone, or else with Miss Windus."

"I'm sure Miss Windus can spare you for once. One doesn't get congratulated like this every day," I pressed.

She laughed merrily. "Some of us don't get it at all," she said. "With pleasure, Mr Jeffries."

I slapped Schmoller back into his place on the shelf, and went off, drunk with bliss, to get my hat and coat.

That night I walked with Evie for the first time to Woburn Place. Never had the Bloomsbury streets seemed so short, never the east side of the British Museum so few paces in length. I remember very little of what we talked about, I know she spoke of her visit to Guildford. The invitation, she gave me to understand, was really to her aunt, and it was to the subject of her aunt that she quickly returned when I insinuated a mention of Archie's name. I insinuated it again a minute later, but after that, noticing the way in which she came back to the aunt again, I forbore.

"But I'm afraid we can't ask the Merridews back, as we ought," she said, once more socially prescient. "We only have rooms in Woburn Place, you see, and you can't very well ask people all that way just to rooms, can you?"

"No," I replied briefly. I was thinking of my own late hospitality to Archie.

"We used to have a house, of course, before uncle died, and you know how poky rooms seem after that."

"Yes," I replied, compressing my lips.

And so we chatted. I forget what our other subjects were. I left her, with our first hand-shake, at her door.

What that week-end was to me I will not attempt to tell you. I did not belong to this earth at all. The fact that actually, in her person, she was enjoying herself in Archie's company at Guildford was nothing to me; the fact that every fibre of me was rapturously tremulous at the thought of her was everything. I triumphed as if I already had her yielding in my arms. Archie?... In my possession I laughed. I even felt kindly to Archie--felt towards him that it would give me pleasure to have him, by-and-by, a quite frequent visitor at my house--our house.... I spread the mantle of my exaltation over the draymen and porters of the place where I dined. Their heavens were not mine, but if a man is full he is full, and I allowed them sanctities of their own. My heart was soft and generous to them. For the first time in my life I knew what folk mean when they say they love all the world.

The sweet influence had not quite left me when on Monday night I went to the college to see her again.

She did not appear that night. Neither did he.

It was Wednesday before I saw her again.

I do not know what damnable difference in me that absence of the pair of them for a single evening made. It came over me so suddenly that I was in its clutches before I was aware. It was a significant transformation. Let me relate it.

I knocked at the brass knocker of Archie's ivy-green door an hour before the class on the Tuesday night, and found that he intended to work at home that evening. (I only learned this, however, some minutes later.) I had had a double reason for calling on him at that hour, and the blood comes hot again in my cheeks as I recall my second reason. I had recently bought a new suit of clothes, not in Lamb's Conduit Street, but made, though cheaply enough, to measure; and though it was only the beginning of the week one of the payments for this suit had already depleted my pocket almost to the last penny. Since breakfast that day I had not eaten. But I knew the hour at which Archie dined.

So nicely had I hit the moment for my self-invitation that I actually followed his hot dinner half-way up the stairs. It was only on the first landing that the servant stood aside with the tray to allow me to precede her. I knocked at his door and entered, leaving the door open for the dinner of which I intended to partake to follow.

He had brought a fowl back with him from Guildford, with one or two other motherly gifts, and I smelt the white sauce even before Jane put the tray down on a side table. Archie was in his brown dressing-gown, standing before his fire. He had taken the green shade from his lamp, and his low-ceilinged roof-chamber looked exceedingly ruddy and comfortable and home-like.

"Hallo! Good man!" he cried. "You're just in time--I was just funking carving--you'd better be getting your hand in for when you're a family man!... Bring another plate, Jane.... Well, how's things?"

It was then that the thing happened that still has power to bring the blood to my cheeks. It was exquisitely cruel in the moment of its coming.

"Oh, so-so," I replied carelessly.... "But I've just this minute swallowed my dinner, thanks. You go ahead. I'll watch you."

"Oh, rubbish!" he replied, in a tone that hardened me. "I'll lay you haven't had so much but you can pick a bit of Surrey fowl."

I damned the thickness of his hide, but swallowed my choler.

"Really, thanks," I said, turning away to look at a print on the wall that I had seen a hundred times before.

Jane hesitated. It was a long way up from the kitchen, and the old bell-pull of red rope by his fireplace didn't always ring. "Shall I bring the other plate, Mr Merridew?" she asked.

"Yes--bring it--he'll change his mind!"

But in my hellish pride I had now no intention whatever of changing my mind. Twice again he pressed me, and twice I declined, the second time curtly; and he fell to himself, while I sat in a chair and watched him.

"Oh, by the way," he said suddenly, with his mouth full of food, "I'm going to work here to-night.... Sure you won't have some pudding?"

I rose. "Oh, well, if you're not coming I'll sheer off; why didn't you say so? Enjoy your week-end?"

"Oh, first rate. But, dash it all, don't be in such a hurry--you're far too early yet."

"Oh, I've just remembered something," I said, "See you again soon."

And I waved my hand and left.

I did not go to the class either that night. I was raging again, and trying to protect that young fool from the injury of my savage thoughts. I failed completely. Not even the thought that my passionate resentment was a force to be confined as it were in a boiler, and only to be allowed to escape by the way that would prove effective, restrained me from clenching my fists and gritting my teeth as I recalled the image of his pretty and ignorant and conceited face; and I am afraid I "let go" utterly. I walked by way of Chancery Lane and Bouverie Street to the Embankment; I crossed Blackfriars Bridge, and after that I don't quite know where I went, trying to forget my hunger, and trying to shake off my hideous grudge against the world that threatened to crash over the head of the egotistical whipper-snapper I had left.

I have related this at some length because it was the first time, but not the last, that that devil of sensitiveness took me in quite that way.

VIII

I had not exaggerated when I told Archie Merridew that I might find some difficulty in obtaining from Rixon Tebb & Masters' leave of absence for the day of the Method examination. That examination was fixed for a Friday, a fortnight and some days after my refusal to set fork into that fragrantly steaming Surrey fowl of Archie Merridew's, and this falling on a Friday added to my difficulties.

Or rather I should say that it added to Polwhele's difficulties, for it was to Polwhele I looked once more to find a way out for me. For Friday was a wage-day, and since I must have my eighteen shillings in order to live, a mere covering of my absence would not suffice. The cashier would have to be taken into the arrangement.

But Polwhele had by now to some extent got over his dread, if not over his hatred, of me. When I put the matter to him he refused. This was in the street, during the luncheon hour. The louse refused to help me, and turned away.

Exactly fifteen minutes later I had bearded the cashier himself, catching him at the door as he was returning from his meal.

At first he looked at me as much as to say, "Did _I_ speak to _you"_? Then, finding it impossible to pretend he didn't know who I was, he said, "What is it?"

I told him what I wanted, concealing only my reason for wanting it; and, after his first astonishment that I had taken the absolutely unprecedented course of addressing a request otherwise than through the usual channel, I found him not unmanageable. As a matter of fact, things were slack, and there was only one kind of labour that Rixon Tebb & Masters' would have preferred to that it had from the agency at eighteen shillings a week--namely, a "floating margin" waiting on the pavement to be taken on for an hour or two as it might be required. Gayns saw a chance of saving a day.

"You don't expect to be paid for that day, do you?" he said.

"No," I replied.

He thought for a moment. "All right," he said. "You can come for your fifteen shillings on Thursday night."

And Polwhele set another mark against me, that I had approached a superior over his head.

As I entered the Business College at half-past ten on the morning of the examination it suddenly struck me that I had never been inside the place in the daytime before. By gaslight it was, as I have said, dingy enough, but by daylight it was shabby in the extreme. I walked round the rooms, noticing for the first time that the shorthand and typewriting rooms, which looked on the side street to the east of the block, were by far the lightest rooms on our top floor, and that the library in which I had received Evie's congratulations was little more than a thick twilight, which the cleaning of the single grimy back window that looked out over yards and chimney-pots would probably not greatly have improved. The room adjoining that, the old ledger-room, was not, except for the small high square of glass that gave on the head of the stairs, lighted at all.

They had made, too, quite extensive arrangements for the occasion itself. We had been warned that we should not be allowed to leave the premises until the examination was over, and as far as possible separate spaces had been provided for each of the twenty-five candidates--compartments of screens hired for the day from some furnisher or shop-fitter, and open at the ends to the gaze of the half-dozen perambulating guardians of the probity of examinations who looked as if they too had been had in for the day on the same terms as the screens. The contrast between the new fittings and the old wallpapers and chandeliers struck me. And I remembered that even now, when I had been debited my three shillings to be present, I did not see the place in its normal daytime aspect at all.

The papers were to be distributed at eleven, and at a few minutes before that hour we were all assembled. A man called Mackie and myself were the only two candidates for the Honours paper, and he and I were kept well apart--I told off to a seat in the middle of the lecture-room, he isolated in the typewriting-room. Evie, timorous about her Elementary, was separated from Archie Merridew (who occupied the box between Miss Windus and a pale student, Richardson) by the whole length of the general room. We took our places; in all the rooms at once voices were heard reading some cautionary form or other (my policeman gave me the most mistrustful of glances as he pronounced the words "expelled from the examination-room and your paper cancelled"); the papers were distributed on the stroke of eleven, and the examination began.

I need not trouble you with what it was all about. The importance of that day to me was quite unconnected with the paper on Method. I ought, however, to say that the paper was in reality two papers, the first in Theory and the second in Practice, with the interval for lunch dividing the two. I mention this only to explain how it was we came to be all talking together when, a little after half-past one, our first papers had been collected and we were free to unsnap our satchels or untie our parcels of lunch.

Despite my reduced income that week I had provided myself with a sumptuous lunch--two kinds of sausage from a _delicatessen_ shop in Shaftesbury Avenue, a paper of potato salad, a roll, butter, some sort of chocolate _baba_ or _moka_, and a bottle of Schweppes' dry ginger ale. That lunch had cost me nearly three shillings--but I intended to eat only a third of it. The rest was to be my chief sustenance during the two following days. I was not among my porters and drivers now--oh no! I was cutting quite a dash. Archie, passing with Miss Windus as I opened my black satchel, did not forbear to remark, "By Jove! doesn't Jeffries do himself well, what?" and it had been in order that I might be assumed to "do" myself equally well every day of my life that I had made my little display. I ate my exact third in the same compartment I had written my examination paper in, and then, closing my bag on the precious remainder, put it under the seat and mingled with the others.

By a sort of natural selection, I presently found myself in the middle bow window, discussing the questions he had just answered with my only fellow-candidate in Honours, Mackie. Mackie, both at the college and elsewhere, was one of these blatantly popular chaps, and I myself didn't like him. In some respects he was rather of Archie's kind, but he was older, more knowing, and had gone further. He was a singer of comic songs at "smokers," and a frequent looker-in at the shilling dances at the Holburn Town Hall after class. He was jubilant over the ease of the Theory paper, and was already so confident of his pass that he was cracking jokes right and left, as if a weight had been taken off his mind.

"It's going to be like money from home if it's no harder than that!" he exulted (almost prophetically, if what I said about the standard of modern examinations is true). "Kitty Windus says she'll eat her mackintosh, with the accent on the 'tosh,' if she isn't all right for the Advanced, and the Elementaries are as safe as your hand in your pocket! What ho! Come out on the stairs and have a Flor de Cabbagos."

I didn't want the Flor de Cabbagos, but I went out on the top landing with him. One or two others were smoking on the floor below, which was as far as we were allowed to stray. A few steps down Miss Windus and Miss Causton were sitting on the stairs, as if they were sitting out a dance, and Miss Causton moved lower down still as the fragrance of Mackie's "Flor" reached her, and then a little way back again as she caught the whiff that came up the well. Mackie was talking of the paper again.

"All that mugging for a job you could do on your head!" he said, with regret for the time he had lost. "I wouldn't have dropped out of the billiard handicap if I'd known! Play billiards, Jeffries? I'm a regular John Roberts--in my dreams. Give you fifty in a hundred at the Napier when teacher says we can go."

And he ran on, with dull facetiousness.

But suddenly he stopped his rapid flow. He made a slight movement with his finger, and stood listening. I heard nothing except the voices lower down the stairs and the general hum in the room we had just left. But Mackie did.

"Hear that?" he said.

"What?" I asked.

"Sssh!..."

I told you how the wooden partition at the head of the stairs, that with the small window high up, separated the landing on which we stood from the old ledger-room. The window was worked with cords on a horizontal pivot, and was swung partly open. Whether Mackie heard whatever he did hear through this window or through the boards themselves I do not know, but a smile came over his face.

"It's that young devil," he whispered.

"Who?"

"Why, young Merridew. He's in there with somebody...."

I invite you to notice that I was improving. I was not eavesdropping this time--I was merely letting Mackie do my eavesdropping for me. He glanced round to see whether the women below were watching, and then set his ear against the partition.

"Yes, it's Merridew," he chuckled. "Nice father's hope and mother's joy _that_ young man's getting! I don't suppose he's gone in there to talk to the secretary bird!..."

I found myself suddenly reminded of what I had noticed for the first time only an hour or two before--that the room beyond the partition was practically unlighted.

Then Mackie dropped again into the "bright" style affected by the singers of comic songs at smoking concerts.

"Ahem--good-hevening, ladies and gen'lmen! How am I? Very well, thank me! Ahem! I will now, with your kind permission, endeavour to entertain you with a few of my well-known impersonations on a subject that will appeal to all of you, no matter what your age, sex, condition, vaccination marks or the number of your dog licence--_London's Lovers_."

"Oh, Mr Mackie's going to recite for us!" I heard Miss Windus' cry of juvenile delight from down the stairs. "Please be quick, Mr Mackie--we shall have to go in in ten minutes!"

And those below pressed up the stairs to hear Mackie.

But I did not stay to hear the "impersonation." I walked back into the general room, and, with a violently throbbing heart, sought the seat where I had written my examination paper.

Do you realise what I had just seen? Do you see what had set my heart so thumping? If Mackie was right, and he had really got the cue for his "impersonation" from something that was going on in the ledger-room, young Merridew and Evie were alone in there together.

All that I had hitherto known of apprehension and despair and jealousy of Archie's luck and chances and juniority was eclipsed by the emotion that now flowed over me like a wave. The revelation swept me entirely off my balance. It seemed to me that once more I awoke as if out of a dream. I seemed to be standing as it were a little way off from my own baseless hopes and illusions of the past weeks and coldly contemplating my own egregiousness. I actually gave out loud a low laugh that harrowed myself. What! To suppose that all, all I could do, would prevent youth from coming together at the last!

So I made myself a spectacle of ridicule for myself.

Then, as the minutes passed, that which at first had seemed a pure and perfect whole of hopelessness changed subtly and began to separate into parts. And that brought such a change in me that I trembled to recognise it. The shock of those first moments had stunned me, but I was now coming out of my stupor. My first swift conclusion had been wrong. These were _not_ young lovers whom mountains could not sunder. She, my sleeping beauty, who had but now opened her eyes, no doubt thought I was that; her soul was over-brimming; and I remembered her look of wonder and reproach when, after she had congratulated me on that love-rise that is the most wondrous of earthly dawnings I had given a puzzled "on what?" When hearts can no longer contain that with which they ache to bursting, lucky is the one who stands nearest to hand. His it is to have, for the lifting of his finger, what else would spill. He may not be athirst for the draught; a muddier liquor might quench his fire as well; but this dew and ichor is his, though another parch for it.

For I needed no pointers from Mackie to know young Archie now. This was his ignored and heaven-high luck, and he did not even want it. If their being together in that unlighted room--their being together even as I sat with my head between my hands staring blankly at the yellow deal screen--if this meant anything at all it meant one thing and one thing only, that she must give because it was her nature to give, and the cub was philandering with her.

At that thought my despair gave place to something else. It was eaten up in the white flame of wrath that flashed like a brand in my brain.

"Oh!" I thought. "So _that's_ it, my Archie?..."

I need not tell you again how I always have made my angers serviceable to me. Five minutes later--though my will was well-nigh deracinated in the process--I was its master again. It still struggled like a beast in my hold, nor did I know whence the help could come without which it would presently have me in its power again, but I still retained my throttling hold on it. One last wild struggle the beast made; this was when beyond the end of my screen-enclosed compartment, I saw them issue, with an interval of half-a-minute between their coming out of the library doorway. He was pink and triumphant; at her I forbore to look. A minute later Mackie passed and gave an infinitesimally small jerk of his head and a wink; but by that time I was holding my savage beast down again.

Then a bell rang; there was a buzz and movement the candidates were making ready again. Once more attendants read the caution, and then the second paper was distributed. Mechanically I turned over the gelatine-copied leaves that had been handed to me.

But I pushed them away again. A man who is engaged as I still was--a luckless hunter who has missed his shot and is struggling desperately body to body with his intended prey--has little time for anything but the business in hand. True, I did draw the paper to me again and tick off the questions that would be productive of the highest marks, but it was long before I got any further. There would come between me and my page Archie Merridew's pink and boastful face as I had seen him issue from the library door.

I do not know how long I sat thus.

Draggingly at last I settled to work. But it was well-nigh hopeless. I came to myself after a long interval to find that I was staring blankly before me and muttering softly to myself. I had not written more than half-a-page. Wearily I tried again.

The next external thing that I was fully awake to was that from the typewriting-room there came the single "Ting" of the small clock on the mantelpiece. I started. That single "Ting" always meant one of two things--one o'clock or a half-hour. I had no watch.

I tried for a moment to persuade myself that the clock had just struck half-past two.

Then I heard the attendant's voice: "You have one hour left."

"Good heavens!" I groaned.

I drew my paper to me again.

For a time I was not conscious of anything but the questions that must be answered by half-past four. Indeed, so feverishly did I work that I did not hear the attendants announce that we had only half-an-hour longer. The next announcement I heard was that fifteen minutes only remained.

Swiftly and flurriedly I turned over what I had written. I was just half-way through the paper.

Wildly alarmed, I broke into rapid shorthand--the shorthand in which I am writing this now. I did not know whether the shorthand would be accepted; I only knew that in its larger aspect the object of the examination was to determine whether I was master of my subject. I was master of my subject. Those already diluted tests of capacity, the questions, dictated their own replies: I put on top speed.

"You have five minutes more," sounded the relentless voice.

But I could have sworn that not one minute elapsed before, much louder and more peremptory, came the final call:

"You must now cease writing!"

As I mingled with my fellow-candidates again I heard Mackie crying joyously, "Oh, we got medals for this in Paris!" But I passed him by without a glance. Nor had I any desire to linger about those premises my first sight of which in the daytime had cost me three shillings in cash, and a murderous rage that might indeed have closed the gates of heaven in my face. I went quickly for my hat and coat, almost colliding with Miss Causton as I turned a corner and muttering I know not what as she shrank back and gave me a look that I could hardly reconcile with her usually ironical and ruminating eyes. I merely wanted to get out of the place....

But I did not escape so quickly but that I saw Archie and Evie following me down the stairs. No doubt they were going together to her aunt's to tea.

A week later I learned that I had passed with distinction in the Theory part of the paper, but had failed in the Practice portion. The examiners made a joke about "Paper Number Two," saying they had decided to hold it over for next year's shorthand examination. Everybody knew whose paper Number Two was....

Mackie had passed in both portions.